Newton’s Fire

‘Our demands?’ frowned Danel. ‘What demands?’

‘Prisoner releases; though that doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that they believe they can talk us out of it. They’ll send in their best negotiators. We’ll bargain. We’ll weaken. Finally, reluctantly, we’ll agree to surrender, though only to the Israeli army, and only if there are enough of them to protect us from the vengeance of the mob. Then, just as we’re being driven away …’ He mimicked with his hands the charges blowing, the Dome collapsing. ‘Can’t you see it? It will drive the Arabs crazy. They’ll hurl themselves at the army in their lust to tear us limb from limb, as you put it. And the army willhave no choice but to fight back in self-defence. And all of this will be being broadcast live to the world, remember. It will make the usual riots look like school parades. There’ll be uprisings in Gaza and the West Bank. Our neighbour governments will be forced by their outraged publics to intervene, to throw their armies against us, and then we’ll be at war, with a clear line drawn. And all the children of Israel will be on our side of that line whether they want to be or not. It will be Jew against Arab, Israel against the world. And we will win, because the Lord is on our side, praise His Name. And when we do win, there’ll be no more Arab vermin here, no more concessions, no more talk of one state or two state solutions. There’ll just be Israel, as was promised to us millennia ago. We’ll build ourselves a Third Temple and we’ll proudly proclaim our identity and our faith. And do you honestly fear for one moment that anyone will keep you in gaol while all of this is going on? The patriots who made possible a Greater Israel? The patriots who made possible the Third Temple. Gaol? They’ll be naming streets after you. They’ll be building statues. You’ll be heroes.’ He looked exultantly around at them, yet still saw doubt on their faces.

‘You’re asking us to trust our lives to crowd psychology?’ asked Danel. ‘What if the Arabs don’t charge? What if our neighbours don’t declare war?’

‘They will,’ insisted Avram.

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Because there’s something else,’ he said. ‘Something that’s happening right now.’

‘And what’s that?’

Avram hesitated. Danel and his comrades were secular Zionists. They wanted a greater Israel as much as he did, but for political more than for religious reasons. Tell them what they were about to find in London, they’d laugh in his face and walk away. But show it to them … ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘It would put too many others at risk. But come to Jerusalem and you’ll see it for yourselves, I swear you will. You’ll see it long before we go in.’

Danel looked around to gauge the mood of his comrades, nodded grudgingly. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But we see this thing of yours or it’s off. Understood?’

Avram nodded. ‘Understood,’ he said.

III

Morgenstern came to greet Croke as he arrived down in the crypt. His face was flushed and it was immediately obvious they’d found something. ‘Looks like your boy was right,’ he exulted. ‘Another cavity. Amazing these damned buildings stayed up, all these holes beneath them.’ He pointed to a triangular mosaic midway between the tombs of Wellington and Nelson. ‘It starts about six or seven feet down, best we can tell. Then there’s a landing of some kind at the head of a ramp or flight of steps.’ He gestured at the granite block holding up Nelson’s black coffin. ‘It leads beneath that thing.’

‘Can you tell what’s down there?’

‘No. We’d have to shift the coffin and the plinth to sweep the floor; and then we’d be asking our scanners to work through sixteen feet of mortar and hardcore. No chance of getting anything reliable.’

‘So what do we do? Another endoscope?’

Morgenstern shook his head. ‘That won’t help either, not if the good stuff’s at the bottom of the ramp, as you’d expect. Besides, we don’t have time to drill and then take up the floor. Not if you want this done by tonight.’

‘And you’re sure this is the only way down?’ Croke asked drily. ‘I mean there aren’t any wells in the vicinity?’

‘Do you see any?’ asked Morgenstern. ‘Seriously, we’ve looked everywhere. There’s nothing. It’s pop the floor or forget about it.’

‘Pop the floor?’

‘We’re going to need a shaft at least four feet square if we’re to get it out, right? The quickest way is jackhammers, but what kind of idiot goes looking for a bomb with jackhammers? People are watching. The government is watching. There’s a limit to how far I can push this. So we’re going to have to cut and lift. My guys tell me that if we angle slightly in as we go down, we can cut ourselves a slab like a giant cork. That way, when we’re finished, we can slather its sides with cement and slot it back in. Then we level it off and let the restorers go to work. Give it a week or two, it’ll be good as new.’

Croke slid him a sceptical look. ‘Sure. And no one will ever know we were even here.’

‘Of course they’ll know we were here; but they won’t know why. And unless they’re prepared to tear the floor up again to go look, they never will. They’ll just have to accept whatever story we give them.’

Croke nodded. It was crude but it could work. ‘How long will it take?’

‘We can start the cutting now while we’re arranging for a workshop crane. When it arrives, we’ll pin bolts into the sides of our cork then lift it up and out, go down and take a look.’ He gave Croke a meaningful look. ‘If you still want to, that is.’

‘You’re saying it’s my call?’

‘No. Something this big, I’m going to need clearance from back home. But there’s no point asking unless you’re still up for it.’

Croke took a deep breath. Until now, he’d always had a way out: to throw up his hands and insist he’d simply been passing on bad intelligence in good faith. That defence ran out here. No one would accept bad intelligence as an excuse for digging up the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. If they did this and found nothing, he’d be screwed. No money, no friends, no alibis. Everyone’s scapegoat. Thinking about it rationally, it was madness to go on. His only sensible course was to cut his losses and get away.

But a strange thing happened as he stared down at the mosaic floor. He saw that it had an almost Masonic- looking device on it: a triangle within a pair of concentric circles within two squares. The words ‘DEUS EST’ were at the very heart of it, with ‘PATER’ ‘FILIUS’ and ‘SPIRITUS’ in the surrounding circle, one at each point of the triangle, and the words NON EST between them. God is the father. God is the son. God is the holy spirit. But the father is not the son, and the son is not the holy spirit. And he experienced a sudden and vivid memory of a childhood afternoon in his mother’s lap, her arms around him and her intoxicating perfume as she explained to him the mysteries of the trinity with the help of an illustrated children’s bible. He could almost hear the wonder in her voice. She’d always liked things that defied logic. For her, irrationality had merely added to their power.

The father is not the son, and the son is not the holy spirit.

He took a deep breath. He’d got in to this business for Grant’s seventy million dollars, but that wasn’t what he was thinking about right now. Right now, he was thinking about destiny. Right now, he was thinking about immortality. ‘I want to see it,’ he told Morgenstern. ‘I think it’s down there, and I want to see it.’

‘Me too,’ grinned Morgenstern. He held up his cellphone. ‘But I’m going to need to clear it back home, like I said. So if you’ll excuse me …’

Croke nodded. ‘They’ll try to fob you off with flunkies,’ he said. ‘Don’t let them. Not for this. For this, you’re going to need to speak to the lady herself.’

THIRTY-FIVE